Babayola M. Toungo
If the North’s decline is indeed the consequence of a profound failure of leadership, as argued in my last article, then the next question becomes unavoidable: how did a region built upon the ideals of public service, institutional discipline and collective purpose gradually descend into a politics that rewards patronage over productivity, loyalty over merit and personal accumulation over the common good? No society declines by accident. Civilisations are not undone by a single disastrous decision or the shortcomings of one generation alone. They are weakened, almost imperceptibly, when the values that once sustained them are slowly abandoned and replaced by a new political ethic in which power is pursued not as a means of building society but as an end in itself. It is in this gradual but devastating transformation that the roots of the North’s contemporary crisis must be sought, for before the region became impoverished economically, it had first become impoverished politically and morally.
The decline of the North did not begin when its economy weakened. It began when its politics ceased to produce and learned instead to consume. Every successful society rests upon a simple bargain between leadership and the people. Citizens surrender authority to those who govern on the understanding that such authority will be exercised to enlarge opportunity, expand prosperity and secure justice. Where that bargain is honoured, politics becomes an instrument of development. Where it is violated, politics degenerates into organised extraction.
That, more than anything else, is the story of contemporary Northern Nigeria. The old political order, for all its imperfections, sought to build institutions that created wealth. Agriculture was not merely an occupation; it was the backbone of the regional economy. Public investment was directed toward increasing productivity. The civil service attracted some of the brightest minds because competence was regarded as an asset rather than an inconvenience. Education was not seen as expenditure but as the surest investment a society could make in its future.
Today’s political economy rests upon an entirely different philosophy. Production has yielded to distribution. Enterprise has yielded to patronage. The citizen has gradually been transformed from a producer of wealth into a recipient of political favours. Government no longer exists principally to create opportunities. It increasingly exists to dispense access.
Every election reinforces the same expectation. The measure of political success is no longer the number of industries established, the volume of agricultural output produced or the quality of schools built. It is the number of appointments secured, contracts awarded and loyalists accommodated.
The tragedy is that patronage can distribute only what production first creates. No society has ever shared its way into prosperity. Every prosperous nation first produced wealth before debating how to distribute it. The North, by contrast, has spent decades attempting to distribute prosperity that was never created. That illusion could never endure.
As agriculture stagnated, industries disappeared and investment declined, government became the employer of first resort and, increasingly, the only meaningful source of economic mobility. Politics became the shortest route to wealth because the economy ceased to reward enterprise with the same certainty that it rewarded political proximity.
The consequences were profound.
Young men and women who might once have aspired to become engineers, scientists, industrialists or innovators gradually redirected their ambitions towards political office and government appointments. Not because politics is inherently more noble than enterprise, but because the incentives of the system made it appear infinitely more rewarding.
When a society reaches the point where political influence is more profitable than productive labour, decline ceases to be a possibility. It becomes an inevitability. This distortion has produced another, even more dangerous consequence. The collapse of accountability.
Political office increasingly became an investment requiring returns rather than a trust demanding sacrifice. Elections became more expensive. Campaigns more transactional. Public office, once attained, became an opportunity to recover political expenditure with generous profit. It is a vicious cycle. Money captures politics. Politics captures government. Government captures public resources. Public resources finance the next election.
The people are left financing a system that steadily impoverishes them. No economist would describe such a model as development. It is extraction. It transfers wealth upward while poverty spreads downward. This perhaps explains the cruel paradox of our time. Annual public budgets have expanded beyond anything imagined by previous generations. Government revenues have grown. Public expenditure has multiplied. Yet for millions of ordinary Northerners, daily life has become more uncertain, more precarious and more desperate.
The arithmetic refuses to reconcile itself. If public resources have increased, why has public welfare declined? If government has become larger, why have public institutions become weaker? If democracy has matured, why has governance deteriorated? These are not rhetorical questions. They go to the very heart of our regional crisis.
For the true measure of leadership is not the size of government but the quality of society.
A government that consumes ever greater resources while producing diminishing public value is not evidence of progress. It is evidence of institutional decay. Nothing illustrates that decay more painfully than the condition of education.
There was once a settled conviction among Northern leaders that education represented the great equaliser. They understood that the child in a remote village deserved the same opportunity to fulfil his or her potential as the child born into privilege. Schools were therefore regarded not merely as centres of learning but as factories of citizenship, productivity and national cohesion. That conviction has weakened with devastating consequences.
Today, the region carries one of the heaviest burdens of educational deprivation anywhere in the developing world. Millions of children remain outside formal education. Too many schools exist only in name. Teachers struggle without adequate training or resources. Universities increasingly produce graduates who must compete in an economy that has failed to prepare itself for the twenty-first century. No civilisation has ever prospered while neglecting the education of its children. History offers no exception.
The North will not become prosperous through political slogans. It will become prosperous when every child – whether born in Birnin Kebbi or Jalingo, Maiduguri or Minna, Damaturu or Lokoja, Yofo or Abuja – receives an education capable of unlocking talent, rewarding diligence and expanding opportunity. That is not merely an educational imperative. It is an economic necessity. It is also a moral obligation.
Perhaps the gravest betrayal of all has been the gradual abandonment of the idea of the common good. The generation that laid the foundations of the modern North believed that public office imposed obligations extending beyond family, ethnicity and religious affiliation. They understood that history judges leaders not by the fortunes of their associates but by the condition of the ordinary citizen. That ethic has steadily eroded.
Public debate has become increasingly consumed by personalities rather than policies, by succession rather than strategy, by electoral arithmetic rather than developmental vision. Meanwhile, the ordinary Northerner continues to confront the same stubborn realities – poor schools, inadequate healthcare, insecure livelihoods, collapsing infrastructure and diminishing hope.
Leadership has become increasingly occupied with winning power. Far less attention is devoted to explaining what power is ultimately for. This is where the crisis of the North becomes more than political. It becomes civilisational. Civilisations do not decline because they lose elections. They decline because they lose the moral disciplines that once restrained power, rewarded excellence and elevated public service above private ambition.
When those disciplines disappear, institutions become hollow, politics becomes transactional and the future is quietly mortgaged to satisfy the appetites of the present. That is where the North now stands. Not at the end of its history. But at one of the most consequential crossroads in its history.
Whether future generations inherit renewal or continued decline will depend not upon the eloquence of our speeches nor the frequency of our elections, but upon whether we finally summon the courage to reject a political culture that consumes far more than it creates.
For no region can permanently live on the memories of its past. Every generation must either enlarge its inheritance or confess that it has squandered it.